I've always been a little bemused by the single-minded focus on clickthrough and direct engagement in online advertising.
In television and radio advertising, you don't have direct engagement metrics like clickthrough -- just reach. X number of eyeballs saw your ad, and that's that. Television ad campaigns tend to have a far more abstract strategy than anything that could be captured by something like clickthrough. They're about building brand image and planting a well-designed perception in the mind of the viewer. It's a long-term strategy. And despite a lack of any measurement or expectation of direct engagement, companies don't even blink at paying hugely more for television advertising than an equivalent reach of internet advertising.
Why are they willing to believe in longer-term, more nebulous ideas like brand image and mindshare with television ads, yet Internet ads are expected to result in direct, immediate conversion for pennies on the dollar? It's as though you measured a TV ad's success by the number of people who dropped whatever they were doing, went out to the store, and bought whatever was on the ad immediately.
It just seems like an absurd double standard, and I don't understand where it comes from (other than the general arbitrariness of marketing in general).
In television and radio advertising, you don't have direct engagement metrics like clickthrough -- just reach. X number of eyeballs saw your ad, and that's that. Television ad campaigns tend to have a far more abstract strategy than anything that could be captured by something like clickthrough. They're about building brand image and planting a well-designed perception in the mind of the viewer. It's a long-term strategy. And despite a lack of any measurement or expectation of direct engagement, companies don't even blink at paying hugely more for television advertising than an equivalent reach of internet advertising.
Why are they willing to believe in longer-term, more nebulous ideas like brand image and mindshare with television ads, yet Internet ads are expected to result in direct, immediate conversion for pennies on the dollar? It's as though you measured a TV ad's success by the number of people who dropped whatever they were doing, went out to the store, and bought whatever was on the ad immediately.
It just seems like an absurd double standard, and I don't understand where it comes from (other than the general arbitrariness of marketing in general).